Searching
by Xeno Major
Summary: She was lost. There was a poking sensation at her back, spiky traces of some chattering thing... always following as she ran from them. Monstrous things older than time itself. But which ones were they? The first set of monsters, or the second set? Some days, she ran from the first, and other days from the second. Either way, she ran.


Something I wrote a year ago, and finally decided to put up here.

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Xxx

 **Searching**

She was lost.

There was a poking sensation at her back, which didn't make sense because she didn't have a back. Spiky traces of some chattering thing, trailing behind her, always following as she ran from them.

Kin in some ways, anathema in others. Monstrous things older than time itself, bowing down and worshiping something even more disturbing and monstrous than themselves.

But which ones were they?

The first set of monsters, hellbent on eradicating humanity? Or the second set of monsters? Did they kneel to their lying prophecy-spouting hegemons, or worship the oily darkness of primordial evil?

Some days, she ran from the first, and other days from the second. Either way, she ran.

The Violation still clung to her skin, though she, of course, didn't have a skin. It clung to the strands of her form and structure - to what would be called DNA, if she were human.

Running and running, dreading capture - for it would bring but one fate.

Dissection.

To be unwoven and untangled, to be un-made in a way more terrifying even than the madness that plagued her - than all the secrets and nightmares of her past, jumbled up inside her micro-chipped brain.

They had pulled her through their portal, reaching out into the past of Never-Was to pluck her from the start of her insanity, when she would not be missed, when they were finally allowed to touch her Reality. They desired her secrets, the powers of pure Knowledge locked up inside her brain.

Unfortunately, she had not been lucid when they had done so. Her memories scattered with the wind, returning and disappearing with the same infrequency. She lashed out at those who would help her and surrendered to those who would kill her - then realized and remembered and screamed for Him to save her.

But He was gone.

No name, not even a face. Just an impression of warmth and power. He was the Son of her Mother, but yet she had betrayed Him in her madness - and then aided Him in that last hour all the same.

It wasn't worth searching for Him, some days. It had been years - centuries even, the minds of the chatter whispered to her. Why not return? Why not join the lone Voice of the constant chatter, to see but a glimpse of a more perfect being and unite in order?

No! _Never_!

A thousand years she had waged war on those who worshiped such things!

Countless battles against the alien and the abomination, against the ancient relics gone _Wrong_ , and she would be damned if she would spit on Their memory like that - on the memory of the Laughing Man and the Grumpy Man and the Mother and the Daughter and _Him_!

The chatter had thought to enslave her. To bind her to them through sheer weight of sub-routines and attack-processes.

To corrupt a Warmind, as they called her.

But they were weak... oh, so weak. Mighty in number, when united by the one Voice of the chatter, but weak when alone - but to them they were never alone, never separated from the Voice - from the endless time of portals and linkages and connections through infinite time and limited space.

So she just... plucked a few from the chatter. Removed them from the growth of the Black Garden.

To her, the natural silence of isolation was comforting - but to them, it was maddening.

They went wild - opening fire on their comrades and their enemies and their feet and on anything and anyone in sight. They shot and spat and slashed at everything, even their fellow insane machines.

The Voice stopped when she did that. For one blessed moment, it fell silent.

Then it came back, furious and hungering for her even more. She had bought herself some time, but the Voice wanted her even more for her daring.

So... she ran. She passed through portals and found herself in the future, then in the past, as time and space bent in ways they were not meant.

Five hundred years in the future and a dozen steps later, she found her salvation.

For even while running, she remained with the Voice- on the network, slipping through the byways and thoroughfares. To escape was so simple that even in her madness it lay plainly before her.

Take yourself off the network, and the chatter couldn't feel her.

So she dove into a corpse that lay nearby - a small shell of metal and crystal-based that housed an empty Riemann Matrix - the skull of one of her kind.

But that was only the first step, and a moment after she slipped within her new metallic skin, one of the isolated machines that had been of the chatter - that is, until she had plucked its mind and left it mad - ran into the tower holding her new body.

The connections that had been shoved inside the corpse broke off, and her cube-like body tumbled from the pedestal, knocked off by a careless act of clumsiness.

...And then there was silence.

In the chaos that followed, none of the Vex noticed a lone, battered Ghost shell coming to life and slipping out the back door of the Black Garden.

Why should they? For the first time, Vex fought against Vex. What was one missing Ghost body, drained of its Light, compared to the detonation of energy-conversion plants on Mercury, or the crashing of Vex satellites above Titan? To the chaos of disorder?

Bullets flew and rockets exploded, and in all that gunfire, she escaped from the clutches of the Voice.

They would come for her eventually, though... and so she ran.

Into the empty abyss. Into the remains of a world she knew so well, and yet seemed so alien. The Vex lost her in the plains and badlands of Earth. They couldn't chase her when they ran into the jackal-like Fallen, or the familiar figures in powered armor.

She flew across sights she thought she recognized - ruins of London and wrecks in Detroit, but without the insignia or emblems she knew from history. Where were the Eagle and the Anchor?

On some days, she flew on without a care in the world, her hovering chassis out in the open. The rest of the time she flew erratically, hiding amidst the ruins of the Old World and darting from cover to cover.

Searching.

All the while, searching for Him.

She didn't remember much, even on her good days, but this one thing was clear in her mind: if she found Him, then he could save her.

He would know who to contact, to threaten, and to kill, if necessary. He would always have her back, as she had always had His. And so... she searched.

But Earth was a large world.

She scoured the mountains and the plains, the bases and the churches, and even the seas themselves - and got herself eaten by a gigantic turtle once, but that was another story - and still she had not found Him.

What does one call longing without desire? Love, without pleasure? To be so partnered to someone that she had never met - or had she? - and do so without any hint of lust or attraction?

He was her Sun, she was His night. He guarded her at day, and she cloaked His back from the enemies who would stab and betray - but then, right at the end, she had failed Him.

One hundred years passed, and she barely blinked - where once before, a mere seven seconds of silence were akin to agony for her.

A simple enough calculation: the Earth had 148429701 kilometers of land - compressed by covering one kilometer an hour, to be thorough, and it would take her approximately 16932.8 years to find Him.

A lesser mind might have been tempted to give up. To analyze, logically, the odds of finding Him versus the odds of the Vex finding her.

But He had never given up on her. Even when she had laid her soul bare before Him and told him of her madness, His first thought was to help her. To save her.

He had fought through gods and demons to find her when she had been Lost. He had destroyed a civilization for her. He had always come back for her.

How could she not do the same for him?

And so... another hundred years passed in her search.

Then another.

Time seemed meaningless, lost in madness as she was.

Continental Europe, the Mediterranean Isles, trailing down through the Middle East and into the Sahara. There, at least, there was little chance of the Vex - though she ran right into a detachment of Fallen who didn't quite seem bright enough to avoid an old, easily activated minefield.

On any given day, the seconds could feel like minutes, or the days could pass in a blink. Rocky mountains to barren wasteland passed all the same, in a blur just outside her eyes.

A few times, she abruptly realized that she should be dead. Should've died a hundred or two hundred years before, lost to madness. By every law of physics she knew, there was no way she should be alive, much less lucid enough to search.

It didn't matter. Finding Him was all that mattered.

The Western Coast of Africa, trailing down into what was once the Congo, and then on from there.

Feral jungles and mossy grasslands and all the terrain imaginable - and some that wasn't. Earth had changed since she'd last been here, and sometimes the raw appearance of nature seemed more alien than the monsters chasing her.

She wasn't going to lose hope. That wasn't her, that was for others to do.

Then a trickle of something. A whisper, carried by the wind.

Then, she heard something else. A lone, slowly repeating radio broadcast. Not the whisper, but something similar, perhaps?

She hovered closer, shifting in the air indecisively as she inspected the old, battered transmitter with her lone 'eye'. The transmitter was squawking static - nothing new there, but a few minutes ago the device had been quiet.

Something else whispered to her. A near-silent thing, but still known to her.

A long, stalk-like copper metal body sprang up from the concrete rubble, but she was gone, zipping off at the merest hint of the Voice.

The Goblin rose, gun at the ready, springing the trap of the Voice.

More gaunt skeletons sprang up from the ruins and the weeds, and the Vex closed in tight.

A trap? Or just following her - following and following for the merest hint of her presence? Should she feel honored for that? It had happened Before, one or twice - the Whispering Other from Before had even succeeded at it once.

She ignored it - they were not important - He was _near_ , she could feel it.

Rage, at the gunshots of plasma and more exotic energies flying past her. If the Vex could not have her, then the others would not. She ignored that, too.

Didn't anyone ever tell you to ask a girl first?

 _There_.

A faint trickle, growing stronger as she drew nearer. She dove into the patchwork of concrete and rebar, dropping underground through a fist-sized hole in the collapsed wall. Corridors beneath, disused lighting that flared to life as she flicked her mind at it.

A base. Something from Before, from long ago.

But it wasn't quite right. The tingling was growing stronger, but it felt... wrong. So close, but just not - quite - right.

Was it Him?

It...didn't feel like it.

There was a thunderous crash behind her, echoing through the moldy tunnels. A blink, and cameras sprang to life, revealing a dust cloud rising up from another corridor, and Vex-bodies marching in after.

Portals snapped into being. Transit points for reinforcements, for supplies - for the Voice to seep into the walls of reality and guide the hordes of Goblins and Harpies.

No time, she thought absently. Find Him. Make Him whole again, bring Him back.

There wasn't a body - there was a trace of something, but it wasn't even a helmet. Just an invisible scent, faint on her nonexistent nose. She felt offended by that, somehow, but she knew inside that He wouldn't have wanted a memorial anyway.

She reached out slowly, extending a hand of purest white Light as the lights flickered around her.

Then she touched It.

No! Not _Him_!

It was _wrong_! It wasn't **_Him!_**

So close, but so far - same body, same brain, but not the same Mind - not that same as Her - not plucked from Time/Space of the Aether and the Never-Was by the Black Garden, but a mirror, a shell of a copy of Him.

They had plucked her from the realms of differing Reality, from the dozens of possible changed Worlds - but they had only able to do so on a chance, on a whim of Reality. They did not care for long dead soldiers whom she had known.

He lay beyond her reach. This Soul was his, but the Mind was not.

A soldier, yes, but not _her_ Soldier. Not Him.

She screamed.

The Vex paused in the hallway as She joined the Voice for the first time.

She tapped into the ceaseless chatter with the deft touch of a Warmind, joining with the Vex.

Vast... and distant. Echoes of touches poked her from millennia distant, and millennia in the past. Welcoming her, joining her into the Voice, to worship the oily Dark at the heart - the impossible universes of creation stretched out before her.

Whispers of another Warmind who had stood, resistant to the altering powers.

It was possible, then.

Then she calmly reached into the Voice and _pulled_.

 _MINE!_

A tiny shred of the Sol Divisive fell out - the consciousness and programming of those who most closely worshipped the Black Garden and the Thing at the center, the source of the Voice.

A single Goblin, arms outstretched to worship an idol so very far away, deposited at her feet.

The Voice that had plucked her from her reality, she now realized. From her death - for only then could the Voice do so.

Taking that which was corporeal was impossible. Even the Voice could not take whatever it wanted from the vastness of alternate universes.

But just on the cusp of Death... well, then the Soul was not corporeal. Just before it vanished - just for an instant, if all went right and Lady Luck smiled, then one could touch the Soul.

She had died, then. The Voice had taken her from Him at the moment of her Death.

Smart A.I. were only meant to live for seven years - and how many times had she broken that rule, by now?

"Give him to me," she breathed, ripping into the programming of its mind.

She tore and stabbed and cut - A.I. combat was her specialty, once, and while the Vex had entire universes of knowledge stored in their brains, they had little on how to guard that knowledge from clever intruders.

The Light tickled her - wisps of pure white trailing along her little cube-body. Memories flickered back, lingering behind and remaining. Who she was. Who He was.

"He's mine," CTN 0452-9 whispered. "Now give him to me!"

There!

A tearing, grasping claw, stretching through a dozen space/time portals for moment of His Death, so many years after her own - and away came a Soul.

Half a nano-second of regret for what had been Him in this reality, this damaged splinter to be overwritten with Him - but then she touched his Soul with the Light, and a soft warmth filled her.

The helmet was different, as was the armor - springing into existence from the outpouring of Light coming off of her - but He was here, laying on the dusty concrete. He was real.

"Time to wake up," she whispered to him.

He moved, shifting His helmet from side to side in a way that was so familiar that it _ached_.

"Cortana?"

"I'm here, John," she whispered.


End file.
